


Through the Looking Glass, Darkly

by Netgirl_y2k



Category: Merlin (TV), Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Crossover, F/F, Female Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-06
Updated: 2012-11-06
Packaged: 2017-11-18 02:17:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,220
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/555781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Netgirl_y2k/pseuds/Netgirl_y2k
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're sitting together drinking wine the colour of blood, and Morgana thinks that what she'll miss most about the Enchanted Forest - even more than Regina's hit-and-miss companionship - is its comparative lack of subtlety.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Through the Looking Glass, Darkly

They wouldn't call what they are _friends_ , and that's probably what keeps them safe from each for so long; neither Morgana or Regina has ever been very good at being someone's friend.

(And anyone who doesn't believe that should ask Guinevere or Maleficent sometime.)

Their not-quite friendship is mostly made up of thinly veiled insults, too-sharp smiles, and quiet unspoken understanding. 

For one thing they both understand that after you've been pushed and pushed towards the edge of your compassion, your love, and sanity it can feel like the only choice left is to take a running leap into the abyss, start dressing head to toe in black, and pretend that this whole thing had been your idea in the first place.

*

This is how Morgana meets Regina, the first time:

There are other worlds, everyone knows that, or at least they would if it wasn't the sort of knowledge that could get you killed. But the spells required to travel between them are dangerous, blood magic that kills as many sorcerers as it doesn't. 

But lying on the forest floor, felled by one of Arthur's knights (not even one of the ones with names, to add insult to injury) losing blood and with few other choices, Morgana reaches out with her magic and thinks: _away._

She's unconscious by the time the portal opens. 

*

"You're far from home, dear," is all Regina says when Morgana wakes. 

(Of course, Morgana doesn't know Regina's name yet; won't know it until a child comes barreling unannounced into the room saying, "Regina, my father says--" and Regina plasters an insipid smile across her face and says, "Not now, Snow, dear.")

"Did you--?" Morgana begins, because she's alive and for all her desperate clinging to life she wasn't really expecting to be.

"I don't make a habit of providing assistance to strange women I find bleeding on my flagstones," says Regina. 

Morgana glares at her. But for all of Regina's sneering, someone has put Morgana to bed and taken her boots off, which as minimum standards of care go still beats the hell out of Gaius, at least she isn't worried that anyone's been pouring sleeping draughts down her throat while she was out. 

*

Leopold is an idiot; Morgana is starting to suspect that it's a job requirement of kings. 

"Your husband is a fool," she tells Regina who raises an eyebrow at her and says, "Do you imagine that I haven't noticed that?"

But Leopold _is_ an idiot. He seems to regard Morgana as some manner of fragile injured creature that Regina is taking care of; and any man who would mistake Morgana for a bird with a broken wing, or Regina for the sort of woman who would nurse one back to health, deserves whatever is coming for him.

Regina, for her part, is more interested in Morgana's magic. 

Morgana knows that she's sharing too much, and too easily, but the experience of someone knowing she has magic and seeing it as reason to keep her alive is such a novel one...

And anyway, it's not like she isn't learning from Regina too, Morgana thinks as she watches the queen pluck a serving girl's heart right from her chest. 

She tries to envisage how it would be to do the same thing to Arthur; less hygienic, she imagines.

The rules are different in Regina's world, this is probably what allowed Morgana to recover so quickly and cleanly from what should have been a fatal sword wound. 

(Early in their acquaintance Morgana spent a great deal of time wondering if she should be concerned about Regina plucking her heart out, and if that would finally, finally prove that she was still in possession of one.)

Regina takes a special interest in Morgana's affinity with snakes, less so with wolves.

She demonstrates a spell whereby tree branches will assault or restrain people as she wills; Morgana imagines that she'll get a _great deal_ of millage out of that one when she goes home.

"What's your world like?" asks Regina, enchanting a branch to snap out and attempt to grab Morgana by the throat. 

"Dreadful," says Morgana, dancing out of the way. And then, because she's recently seen Regina tear someone's heart out and frankly she doesn't need that level of competition, she adds, "You wouldn't like it."

*

"A hat?" Morgana says in her most scathing tones, which after years of practice are pretty damn scathing. 

"If you like, we could try your method of travelling between worlds, dear. What was it again," Regina asks, holding up a hand topped with fingernails like steel talons, "a sucking abdominal wound?"

"The hat is fine," Morgana says quickly. 

*

The second time Morgana lands in a bloody heap at her feet Regina doesn't even glance up from her looking glass, saying only, "Are you sure that you're cut out for the Evil Queen business, dear? You do seem to get stabbed an awful lot."

"Bloody Mordred," Morgana groans in response.

*

Time moves differently in Camelot and the Enchanted Forest. 

The king is dead, the irksome child Snow White has grown into the irksome young woman Snow White, and Regina is planning something faintly ridiculous with a poisoned apple.

Morgana must look unconvinced because Regina snaps, "As though you're in a position to judge anyone on the subject of misdirected rage."

Morgana attempts to look haughty and as if she doesn't know what Regina is talking about, mostly because she doesn't know what Regina is talking about. 

Although it's entirely possible that Regina was subjected to a slightly pathetic blood-loss fueled rant about Guinevere that Morgana is choosing not to remember. 

*

Regina's taste in interior decoration features a disturbing number of mirrors - the idea of a reflection that can talk back to you _horrifies_ Morgana - but aside from that Regina's palace is kind of amazing, dark and sweeping with majestic mountain views. 

Between this and Nemeth Morgana is starting to suspect that Camelot is kind of rubbish, as kingdoms go. 

Which is, of course, entirely beside the point. 

*

Regina has her ridiculous apple plot to be getting along with, so it's Regina's father, Henry, who takes Morgana - in Regina's carriage, and _this_ is how she's going to travel once she's queen of Camelot - to Jefferson's to hitch a ride home with the hat.

"I think it's good for her, to have a friend to talk to," he says. 

Morgana smiles weakly, and wonders if she'd have turned out differently if she'd had a father like Henry. Probably not, she thinks, it hasn't exactly done wonders for Regina, has it. 

After all, which is worse, a mad father who'd burn you at the stake, or a weak one who'd stand by and let it happen.

*

The third time, which is after Camlann, and Morgana isn't sure who stabbed her this time but at some point after Regina has helped her up off the floor Morgana is going to find them and make them pay. 

Regina is _somewhat_ unsympathetic. "You are going to clean up all this blood before you leave, aren't you?" she says.

*

In the midst of all the stabbings (which Regina insists on referring to as a bad habit which Morgana really must try to break) Morgana perfects a spell that allows her to step between worlds without the necessity of nearly bleeding to death every time. 

After Neverland (ridiculous place) Wonderland (an ever more ludicrous place) and A Galaxy Far Far Away (what the ever loving _hell_?) Morgana has rather gone off the idea of visiting Regina, but as she's here now she may as well stay for a glass of wine. 

("I just want to win, just once," Morgana says. 

Regina manages a slightly awkward arm pat. "I know, dear.")

*

Morgana laughs and laughs when Regina tells her about True Love's Kiss, because it's just so appalling and absurd, that you get one chance at true love and if it goes wrong then you're doomed forever. And if Morgana's one cocked-up shot at happiness was with Arthur or Gwen, or - Triple Goddess forbid it - Merlin, then she wants to know who she should be addressing her many complaints to.

And then, because Regina's lips are pursed in a way that implies that she doesn't find this nearly as funny as Morgana does, and if she doesn't she'll always wonder, Morgana leans over and presses her mouth against Regina's.

"Looks like you're not my true love," she says when she pulls back. 

"There is a God after all," says Regina, her lips quirking upwards into a smile, and Morgana starts laughing again.

*

One time, Morgana attempts to hex Rumpelstiltskin. 

It's just after she's found out about Merlin - no, sorry, about _Emrys_ \- and she feels like her flesh is going to boil straight off her bones. She has just enough presence of mind to think that now might be a good time to visit Regina before she does something catastrophic, at least until she's sure that she can beat Emrys in a fight. 

And there's Rumpel, standing in the shadows pulling Regina's strings, the same way Merlin has long been pulling Morgana's. 

Anyway, Morgana spends the better part of the day shut up in an obscure part of the Summer Palace while Regina negotiates a deal by which Rumpelstiltskin won't turn Morgana into a cockroach and then step on her. 

And Regina may be - admittedly, largely through the absence of other candidates - Morgana's best friend, but she still hates exactly how huge this favour she's going to owe Regina will be.

*

"Rumpelstiltskin was the one who taught me magic," Regina tells her later. 

"So he taught you everything you know?"

"Mmm, yes."

"What about everything he knows?"

Regina gives her a withering look, and suddenly Morgana understands why Regina didn't leave her to die that first time, and why she's always been so interested in how magic works in Morgana's world. Morgana feels belatedly guilty that her magical repertoire at the time didn't extend much beyond: hurl them against solid objects until they stop moving.

*

"A world without magic," Morgana says when Regina tells her about the Dark Curse, "that sounds awful."

"Yes, dear," says Regina, "that's rather the point."

They're sitting together drinking wine the colour of blood, and Morgana thinks that what she'll miss most about the Enchanted Forest - even more than Regina's hit-and-miss friendship - is its comparative lack of subtlety.

*

Morgana manages to visit Storybrooke, just once. 

It turns out that Regina has inadvertently invented time travel while attempting to curse everyone she's ever met and Morgana is just trying to live her way through her very long life.

(Really, she's supposed to be waiting for Arthur to come again, but by now Avalon is buried beneath the Cardiff suburbs, and Morgana likes to imagine Merlin's face when he realises that Morgana has buggered off from his arrogantly imposed punishment to take a road trip through America.)

Regina lets Morgana hold Henry, the new, infant one, which is nice when it's not reminding Morgana that everyone she knows is old and dead. 

"People like us don't get to win," she tells Regina, "at least not for very long."

"Eighteen years is quite a long time," says Regina, taking the baby back from Morgana. "What's the longest you ever managed?"

"All together?" Morgana says with better humour than she ever would have managed before, because nine centuries heal like almost nothing else. "About three months."

*

Morgana kisses both of them goodbye; Henry on the forehead, Regina on the cheek. 

Regina tilts her head and lets her lips drag against Morgana's. "Do you know what I like most about your world? No such thing as True Love's Kiss."

"I did once know a couple who I'd swear were being stalked by an overly emotional violinist," Morgana replies.

*

It's over a decade and a broken curse before they see each other again. Regina is in London to introduce Henry to European culture, or so she claims. Morgana later finds out that Emma bet her that Regina didn't have a real friend from anywhere, and so they visit Morgana and Regina wins on a technicality. 

(Avalon is still in Wales; but Morgana figures, what the hell, a zombie King Arthur rising from Cardiff Bay would be the sort of thing that would be a trending topic on twitter, she could always get on a train.)

Morgana and Regina are drinking espresso at a pavement cafe, it's slightly too cold to be drinking outside, but Emma and Henry are getting ice cream from the van across the square so they look comparatively sensible.

Morgana follows Regina's gaze and wonders what it is that's going on there; she's heard the story of the poisoned apple turnover by now, and that's exactly how Morgana would try to get the attention of a woman she liked.

(You can get therapy for free on the NHS now; Morgana has problems, she's aware of this.)

"So..." Regina begins.

" You and Henry and Emma?"

"Any sign of your brother returning?" Regina asks, changing the subject. "Or any of his friends?"

Morgana tries not to smile. "No. Not one."

Regina lifts her coffee cup. "To happy endings."

"To happy endings."

"Or at least as happy as people like us get," Regina finishes, and they clink their cups together.


End file.
